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The ingenuity of spammers continues to amaze. One of their latest inventions is to an online striptease game, Melissa Strip, to trick unsuspecting users into providing the brainpower needed to crack CAPTCHAs. Beware of that blonde. She doesn't want your money. She's interested in your brain. Really.

Michael Chertoff, secretary, US Department of Homeland Security, thinks that the conflict between security and privacy was a false dichotomy. The controversial measures he has introduced is to avoid subjecting travellers to intensive scrutiny or searches.

A number of anti-phishing tools are now available. They are supposed to warn web surfers when they are about to enter a phishing web site, so they can steer clear. Unfortunately, they seem less then perfect. Not only is one my own web pages branded as a "known phishing web site" by one of these tools (Norton Internet Security Online), but another tool brand a well known phishing site as "verified".

Here are pointers to some key sources that indicate the rate of change for some core technologies and usage patterns, including CPU capacity (Moore's Law), Energy consumption (Koomey's Law), and Bandwith (Edholm's Law).

Last year, there was been a number of battlefield reports from the ongoing struggle between the traditional news industry and search engine Google about the legal status of Google's reuse of materials automatically collected by its robots and shown as part of its SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as snippets or linked to in the so-called Google “cache”.